Acer Liquid A1 Snapdragon smartphone coming to the UK in late November

Notebook, netbook and desktop manufacturer have been teasing their Snapdragon-running smartphone, the Acer Liquid A1 for awhile now, but up until now, no firm release date has been set. According to UK retailer Clove, though, the smartphone will be released later this month.

The hardware is in line with what has previously been announced: the Acer Liquid A1 is, of course, running a 1GHz Snapdragon processor underclocked down to 768MHz. It sports a WVGA capacitive touchscreen measuring up to 3.5 inches. There’s also a five megapixel camera, 256MB of RAM, WiFi, 3G and a 1,350 mAH battery.

That underperforming Snapdragon CPU is probably raising an eyebrow right about now, so you might as well raise the other one: the Acer Liquid A1 doesn’t sport Google Android 2.0 as the operating system. Instead, it ships with a customized version of Android 1.6, known as Donut. They’ve just slapped a pretty UI shell over it. However, the Acer Liquid A1 does differentiate itself by being a more social networking centric system, with contacts synced with the likes of Facebook, similarly to the way the Palm Pre or HTC Sense handles things. For addition to the Liquid A1, Acer has also designed their own widgets, as well as a new dialer, a task managing app switcher, a new multimedia dashboard and a skinner applications drawer.

Raised eyebrows or no, it’s not a bad looking phone, but there’s still no US release on the horizon. If you live in the UK, though, you can have one at the end of November for the price of £286, or $481.

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